According to the official White House website, the end goal of
schooling is to “help restore middle-class security.”
Such a stance is a surprisingly honest one in a political environment
built on deceit. The Obama administration makes no attempt to
hide the fact that mandatory public schooling is a state tool
for manipulating class structure. This is both a historical and
economic fact.
Modern American schooling stems from two sources. First the Prussian
school system which was used by the Nazis to limit and control
legal access to information while psychologically training students
in order to promote fascist ideology. The second is the free state-run
schools which were an important part of the caste-structure that
has existed in India for thousands of years. Here, the menial
and “untouchable” classes, approximately 95 percent
of the population, were subject to the rule of the Hindu Brahmin
priest (Gatto 39). Each class had its own forms of education,
all of them placing an emphasis on “truth,” which referred
to the superiority of the Brahmin priest and the proper subservient
role of the student in society.
The core principle of education for the two lowest classes in
India, was ignorance. By filling up the free time of children
with repetitive tasks of little educational value, students were
transformed into thoughtless followers of the Brahmin. One would
believe such a process would drive away any man of God who sought
to help children, but such was not the case with Anglican missionary
Andrew Bell who was able to see the “good” in what he
referred to as the Madras system of education. In 1790 he wrote,
“In every instance under my observation in this kingdom,
and in every report with which my brethren have honored me of
the effects produced by the Madras System in their parishes, the
improvement in the subordination, orderly conduct, and general
behavior of the children, has been particularly noticed, and must
be regarded as infinitely the most valuable feature of its character”
(Bell 10).
Bell enthusiastically took over the Hindu schools and adapted
them to raise impoverished children into loyal subjects of the
Anglican Church. In 1797 he opened up the Aldgate Charity School
in England. In his own words, “Its ultimate object, the ultimate
object or end of all education, is to make … good subjects …”
(Bell 7). He was heavily influenced by the zeitgeist that it was
God’s will that the impoverished remain in their present
state of existence.
Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker in London, took what was once a systematic
approach to subjugating peasants and turned it into a method of
affordably teaching thousands of students, from his own home no
less, so as to empower them to rise to a greater glory. Lancaster’s
school did not last long before it attracted the attention of
Bell, who saw his philosophy of pedagogy being defiled by the
Quaker. Quickly, King George III began funding Lancaster’s
school, and with it began regulating curriculum by requiring that
students learn the Bible (Gatto 41-42). In 1807 Bell contested
the perversion of his system and, with the support of the Anglican
Church, replaced Lancaster’s school with his own. However,
with Lancaster’s school being more popular than the Aldgate
Charity School, it was his name and not Bell’s that came
to define the Anglican version of the Indian Madras system.
Amid fears of non-Anglican values destroying the newly formed
republic of the United States, English-Americans adopted Lancaster
and Prussian schooling (Liggio and Peden). Today the English traditions
that go back over a century in America continue to promote inequality.
The main purpose of school in an industrialized economy is to
signal productivity to employers. Government funding of education
whether by public, charter, or private voucher schools incentivizes
students seeking a competitive edge to spend more time in school.
For the middle and lower classes the results are greater economic
inefficiency. Middle class students who may have otherwise obtained
only a high school degree, now must deplete more savings or go
into debt to get a college degree that signals the same amount
of productivity. For the poor the results are even worse. They
must spend more time in school to signal that they are capable
of higher productivity. The high opportunity cost of going through
school keeps low-income students from being able to afford to
display their productivity, limiting them to lower paying jobs.
Government schools serve to both mentally and economically restrict
students and history makes it clear that is what they were designed
for.
This op ed is a shortened version of the following refereed
journal article: Jordan Reel and Walter E. Block, 2012. “Public
Education: Who is it for?” The Scientific Journal of
Humanistic Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, October, pp. 66-72; this
article may be found here,
or here.
All cites to the present article may be found there.
Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell